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Hello dear Lean-Agilists!

I stumbled upon this post on Linkedin the other day:

Things to do to increase agility:

  • Work small 
  • Reduce feedback-loop time 
  • Trust the workers to make the decisions 
  • Reduce Work In Progress to 1 
  • Collaborate. Converse (with each other, customers, management,…). Work as a team 
  • Think strategically 
  • Eliminate, don't manage, dependencies 

Things to do to reduce agility:

  • Plan ahead 
  • Implement any Agile™️ framework
  • Impose process
  • Track people, rely on metrics rather than conversations 
  • Strengthen hierarchy, create silos 
  • Reward solo work and heroics 
  • Separate customers from devs 

And now I have two questions for you:

  1. Do you agree with all of these statements?
  2. If you had to choose only three of the things to do, which three would you choose and how would you prioritize them?

@Henrik Ståhl -

I agree with the first list, and I’d have added “take a systems view” to the list. I mostly agree with the second list, but not necessarily the first item. Planning is not a bad thing - it’s when the horizon for planning exceeds our confidence in our plans that we get into trouble. After all, a daily coordination meeting/Scrum is a micro-planning session.

In terms of my priorities:

  1. Reduce WIP to 1 - I endorse Don Reinertsen’s advice to do this to get a system under control
  2. Trust the workers - agile is people first
  3. Reduce feedback-loop time - both for the product/service/result and the process used to deliver it

Kiron

Interesting. I don’t agree that “Plan ahead” should be in the “reduce agility” section. “Agile” doesn’t mean No Planning.

 

If I had to only pick three from the list that I’d consider absolute musts, then they’d be:

  • Reduce feedback-loop time 
  • Trust the workers to make the decisions 
  • Collaborate. Converse (with each other, customers, management,…). Work as a team 

@Henrik Ståhl - I agree with the first list.

For the second:

  • Plan ahead 
    • I agree with both @Kiron Bondale & @Paul Snedden - Some planning is okay, even required - just don’t try to plan every detail before you start doing something.

My three to-dos to increase agility would be:

  1. Work small 
  2. Reduce feedback-loop time 
  3. Collaborate

@Kiron Bondale @Robert Johnson @Paul Snedden I agree with all of you – agile doesn't mean “no planning.” To be fair, I believe the author of the post meant excessive planning, but it's way too vague.

There's one thing in the first list that I don't fully agree with: Eliminate, don't manage, dependencies. I guess it depends on what kind of dependencies, but still. I think the obsession with eliminating dependencies is exaggerated. The more you collaborate, the less of a problem dependencies become.

My priorities:

  1. Collaborate. Converse.
  2. Think strategically.
  3. Reduce feedback-loop time.

@Henrik Ståhl -

Agreed - solution dependencies will always exist as we are creating a coherent whole. However, what they usually are talking about is external dependencies - reliance on teams who many not align with our ways of working or have a predictable availability to help us when we need them.

Kiron

@Kiron Bondale You're right, that's probably what he's referring to. I've met too many “purists” though so I always get a little bit cautious when I see those kind of vague statements. 😅

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